CIA Slaying Probe Looks at Assassination

Police are investigating a possible connection between the Pakistani sought in the shooting deaths of two CIA employees and the 1984 assassination of a Pakistani politician with the same last name, officials said Wednesday.

Investigators also have questioned the owners of the courier service where the suspect, Mir Aimal Kansi, worked up until the day before the shooting. The service is owned by the son of a former high-level CIA official.

Meanwhile, investigators were sifting through papers with names and phone numbers on them found in a suitcase confiscated by police from the apartment that Kansi shared with a roommate in Reston, Va., a suburb west of the capital.

Fairfax County police spokesman Robert Wall said investigators were looking to see if Kansi was connected in any way to Malik Gul Hasan Kansi, a politician shot to death by three gunmen in the Pakistani provincial capital of Quetta in June, 1984. He said police did not have information beyond the fact that both men had the same last name.

It was not immediately clear what led authorities to focus on the assassination. Kansi did not mention the slain politician’s name on an application for asylum that he filed with the Immigration and Naturalization Service on Feb. 3, 1992, an INS official said.

A national and international search was under way for Kansi, who was last seen on Jan. 25, the day he is accused of opening fire into cars waiting at a stoplight to turn into CIA headquarters near Washington. Two agency employees were killed and three other men were wounded.

The police and FBI were trying to determine whether Kansi had left the United States. They also were investigating in North Carolina, where they suggested that Kansi might have bought a bulletproof vest that was found among his belongings, Fairfax County prosecutor Robert Horan said.